Rodney Halliday trailed about in the yard. There were a few stars, and the suggestion of a clothes-line, the smoke went up from the roof. He felt a bit alone, for it does increase your sense of isolation watching smoke go up at night. Smoke by day has substance in comparison. Rodney stood watching the smoke. He knew that some day he would die. He had not realized this before. Poor Mrs Worthington’s dead, said Mother, we must write to the girls, we must wire for flowers, a sheaf I think because wreaths are like a funeral. The Worthington girls in black, and Mother put her hand to her chest, and they were eating eggs and bacon, it was breakfast time, you went on eating in spite of death. Death was in the cemetery with a smell of laurels and those crossed hands on Mr Peabody’s grave. It happened somewhere else perhaps, but death reverted to the cemetery, enclosed by ivy, the gate grated on a rusty hinge. Going down the hill
ivy droned. You went on down the hill to school and hoped you would not meet Andy Everett. Effie Worthington had chapped hands. She gave you a gingerbread cake at the farm, and you bit in, it was sticky inside, and a glass of milk afterwards. But death was not here, in the hen-cluck, in the blue shadow of milk on the glass. You would die, but not yet, not yet. The gingerbread.
You knew you would die, and you did not know, it was like that. The smoke wreathed up against a star. You stopped breathing because it suddenly caught you, death. You knew what it meant in the yard, in the dark. You wanted to run away.
Rodney Halliday stood still. This moment when death assumes a personal bearing, no longer the Worthington girls in black, is a moment of significance. It was perhaps the first significant moment in Rodney Halliday’s life. Over against his fear, a sense of importance. Fixed upon this sheet of black, like a star, in his own distinct circumference, his life, till the intervention of death. He was himself. Oliver, Hilda, and George, the idea of corporate safety, were no longer this, were distinct too. The safety line is broken by the consciousness of death.
Growing up then was like this. You were ten. The moments crept, with a scent of apples at eleven o’clock, was always another eleven o’clock, or the afternoon asleep in the sun, incident loomed large in the sun detached from its shadow, there was no skirting round this forest of incident and its solid, waiting forms. This before you knew. Then time began to race down an avenue cold with stars. You wanted to put up your hands. He wanted to go and tell
Margaret Quong, tell her what. Because this was something you could not tell. It happened. You knew it. That was all. Like a scent or sound, you could not tell. Or Mother crying in her room, you went in, you went away, knowing. And She said stay, waiting on the steps of the verandah with cool hands. Father stood in a corner of the dining-room, where is Mother, Rodney, he said. You looked away. Went to the window and knocked out his pipe upon the sill. You looked away. Mother closed her door when you went past, closing her door on what you knew was not changing her dress. He took it up to the post to send to Mrs Worthington, the parcel post, because Mrs Worthington is poor, she said, and an old dress, is dead. She was wearing mauve. A car came up the road out of the direction of Moorang, he could see its lights, with the unimportance of lights on a passing car. I shall grow up, I shall go to Sydney, he felt, I shall do things, I don’t know what, until. The night was very large and black. Father stooped in the dispensary, his shadow stooped, would have said, what are you doing, Rodney, if he knew, but you did not know what to say to Father, or words just came out. Father sometimes made you afraid. Father would die, the shadow on the window wiped out.
Rodney went inside. He did not know what he would do. He wanted to go to the dispensary and say, Father, I want to sit in here for a while. He felt his way along the passage to the door. He stood at the door and waited. He did not know what he would do.
Oliver opened the door and stood there looking out.
Is that you, Rodney? he said. I thought you were in bed.
No, he said. Not yet.
They stood there looking at each other, or not looking. Rodney wondered how he could say what after all you couldn’t say.
It’s late, said Father. You ought to be.
Yes, he said.
Standing there in the passage, could not stay, or stand, because Father would not understand.
Yes, he said. I thought I’d say good-night.
Father’s kiss was rough, like tweed, the suit you touched and wanted to stay, say you knew out there in the yard. But tweed was no longer protection after this. You went down the passage biting your lip, it was a long way from the lamplight and Father closing the door.
Oliver went into the middle of the room. He stood with his head bent, wondered, what was I doing before, he asked. The drawers were open on his activity, the papers scattered, and the diary with the pages torn, he held the pages of a diary in his hand. Then Rodney came to the door. Good night, Father, he said. Tearing pages from a diary, the lamp caught the leaves, grew brown, months, weeks, coiling into smoke, this was the past, as if contained in the pages of a diary and easily destroyed. Then Rodney came to the door. Rodney was also the past. This is all going, Oliver said. He tore up a bundle of papers. He slammed a drawer. It went to savagely, with half its contents hanging out. The way you clung on to papers for no reason, or old emotions, cluttered yourself up with these and had not the courage to clear them out. Well, he said, this is the clearance now, now I can start to breathe, now I am standing before the future, there is no reason for the past. Rodney is also the past. There is no
reason, he said. There is no reason. His face halted in the glass. If you could see your conscience, he wondered, what form would it take? That smooth, stethoscopic Jesuit. He began to laugh. He found himself thinking of broad beans.
Round the walls the photographs, their expressions growing mat and yellow underneath the glass, stared with their customary stare, the always-with-you look of old family photographs. This was one evening in many, except for the litter on the floor and a certain emotional disorder perhaps. It might have happened any time, on any evening just as this, packing the bag before a case and going out. He would only take a bag. He didn’t want anything else, nothing connected with leaves lying brown against the fender, these belonged to somebody else. He was washing his hands at the basin. He saw hands fold round each other, unfold. It was like this. The hands. He saw the water, the soap, and the towel hanging on the rail. Then his hands fumbled in the towel, he must go, he felt, at once, quickly. The photographs stared down with a sort of faded surprise. He was moving in jerks, must go, must get outside before the mechanism broke. The spring strained that controlled the mechanical washing of hands.
In the hall he tore the tab of his overcoat. The house was quiet. Looked down stupidly at the coat, the torn tab, at Hilda saying, Oliver, you can’t go about with your clothes like that, would say that people would wonder how, would Hilda look a needle say. Because Hilda was conscience, that dark phrase in undertone when Rodney came to the door, recurred, till you wanted to put your head on your hand, lean forward with the weight and pray for the strings to lift
up the head, it was by Sibelius, Birkett said, you waited for the strings, for some clarity of tone, not this phrase that ebbed, your whole being flowed backwards into the past, into the throats and the far baying of the horns. Then you saw the programme creak against the floorboards, escape in one flutter, when you had not the power, or the careless sweep of paper, even when the chairs moved, were still there, locked in a past moment that withstood hands and the flowers. But this was music, was ten years that the mind dragged back. This, he said, is dead. Heavy with his coat he opened the door, saw the stars, there was frost upon the step. It was more than opening the door. He did not think back. The frost was brittle underfoot.
Rodney, lying in bed, heard Oliver go. It was like any other night, a case, and Father going out, you heard the car start from the garage after the scrape of the garage door. Mother moved in her room and coughed. But he had to sit up in bed, he had to sit up in the dark, as if it would do any good, because sitting up was dark. Somewhere water dripped on zinc. It was no dream this, that Mother’s hand smoothed sitting on the bed when you woke up, whether Father took the car or not, was still a long way off. He had never felt like this. Slipping away, slipping away, the foot met more than darkness drawn from the sheets as it moved, the blur burr of a car, then breath.
Waiting, waiting for what, Happy Valley waiting in the dark, is the question without answer. There is no collaboration between human curiosity and the attitude of inanimate things, least of all in the dark, when the answer to the question in the dark might prove a momentary, if not the
ultimate solution. So there is no choice but to fall asleep, as Rodney Halliday falls asleep, crumpled up against the wall. There is always this advantage in sleep, you cannot feel you are cheated, until of course the moment of waking, and that is a long way off. So Rodney Halliday sleeps, and his face is once more ten years old. So Walter Quong stirs in the grass at the side of the road and his world is non-dimensional, escaping the nettle’s touch. His dream is unimportant, except as a dream.
Alys Browne sat with her bag in the sitting-room. She waited. She heard the car coming up the hill. All this that I am leaving, she felt, has fulfilled its importance, there is no sorrow attached to discarding objects that are no longer necessary, it is right that I should touch nothing, that I should simply walk out. She thought a bit about Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, the wind blew through the grass in the Park, and on Sunday afternoon the Salvation Army played, she thought a bit about the convent and the face of Sister Mary and over the wall the violet sparks from trams, all this was a dream, she felt, and Hilda Halliday. Then her mind stopped short. She got up. She wanted to walk about. It is wrong to dream, she said, Oliver is reality. She found herself clenching her hands. I want to live, she said, I have a right to this as much as Hilda Halliday, I shall not be possessed by this half-life, this dream, or is it a dream, or is it a dream, or is Oliver a dream. Oliver is coming up the hill. We are going away somewhere, only somewhere, there are no labels, and here we shall live. This is right.
Alys, Oliver said, it was his voice outside.
It was right, his voice said, as she turned down the
lamp, turned it right down, and it was dark, she could see no longer the Alys Browne, part of books and pictures accumulated in a room, an apology for life, or the lack of it. Happy Valley is asleep, she felt, I am no longer part of Happy Valley, this poor dream, this substitute for reality.
Alys? Oliver called.
Yes, she said. I’m coming.
She stood alone in the darkened room, the shreds of past emotions slipping away. There is nothing I regret, she said, there is nothing I, not even Hilda Halliday. These are part of sleep.
They heard it going round and round. Two figures detached by fear were large in candlelight. There was no connection now between Hagan and Vic, for the moment not even the connection of a voice. Fear was a personal preoccupation. While feet trailed round the sitting-room.
Hagan felt his heart bump, then go on its normal way. It made him snort. It wasn’t as if you were afraid, it wasn’t that that gave you a bit of a start to hear. It made him angry to think anyone thought him afraid.
How do you like that? he said, and his voice came with a snort. That’s old Who’s-this back. Makes a cove look funny, he said.
Vic sat on the bed. She did not speak. The sheet streamed floorwards from her breasts. She held it to her breasts, that escaped, hung yellow and static in the candlelight. He was speaking what she did not hear, she felt, she heard the feet.
Well, I guess I’ll push off, Hagan said.
Felt a fool skulking out, though your pants were on, it might have been worse meeting someone in your shirt. He stood in the passage, waiting. His hat. The sitting-room door was an enamel knob. He waited for the knob. He heard the feet. There was no sign. He wasn’t one to look for trouble out in the middle of the road. So he took up his hat. He went down the passage away from the door, almost on his toes. It was easier to breathe in the yard, easier in the lane, where your eyes still waited for the turning of a knob. He began to whistle softly. It was company. A waltz something, that you didn’t mind if Sidney Furlow, you were satisfied, it almost mightn’t have been Vic, she said, Mrs Moriarty gone, and good night, Sidney, you said. She lay on the bed in a funk. Though it gave you the creeps, Moriarty in that room, like a circus horse on the track, or a brokendown cab-horse with gammy knees plodding along William Street, and if that knob had turned you would have said what. Christ, he said, Christ. His breath whistled through his teeth. Not that you were afraid, or anything like that. A white blur was no knob, was moving up the dark, was what.
Who’s that? he said, his voice hollow in the lane.
His eyes fixed upon a white blur that would not take more definite shape. He stopped against the fence.
Eh? said the blur. It’s me.
Then that loony Chambers lumbering up the lane. Hagan saw his face drift past, or the white suggestion of a face. Said his name was Chuffy Chambers, the bulging eye, and they let it go round loose. It made him swear as he went on down the lane.
Chuffy Chambers, lumbering in the dark, felt his skin tingle at a voice. Sometimes he could not sleep at night, he wandered up and down, his feet were soft in the nettles that grew at the side of the road. Hagan, he said it over, rough against his tongue. He could feel himself beginning to shake, with Hagan, with a name mouthed, and holding on to the fence the light at Moriartys’ danced. He felt he must spit out a name that, winding round his tongue, stuck. He must get it out. It trickled down his chin. Then he began to feel better, purified in a way. The stars flowed back. He used to lie on the verandah, when it was summer of course, and count the stars, but he never counted very far.
Chuffy Chambers meandered along the lane, like a name meandering in his head, though only the shape of a name, no emotion now attached. He heard the call of a cat, raucous with love, saw the black pool that was cat elongate and press itself through a hole in Moriartys’ fence. The call echoed frostily. It pierced through the skin with a little shiver, reaching out to touch Ernest Moriarty’s back stooped in the sitting-room. He heard the cry of the cat. He straightened up. He stared at the pattern of familiar objects that were only just there, for the first time taking shape, knew all these again, though different. They pressed down like the pressure of a clock, he had heard, heard, in the pace of feet walking, were his feet, stopped. He knew he had been walking round the room, but why, but why, and why the clock. Then he remembered the hat. His mind pitched back. He was calm enough. Even if the hat.
She said, you’ll take your pyjamas, and the Crown, you’ll wear your pyjamas, the egg, she said, and of course it
must rain because of my straw hat. But going into Moorang you forgot that this was Vic, or a straw hat, or the rain, was a pain in your chest that truck that jolted over the ruts, and your head swam past telephone poles, or wires in loops of telephones that said the voice anonymous. It was in the album, now perhaps, pressed against Senegal, only you did not look, see the lamp you lit when the match broke. He could not remember lighting the lamp. You will read a paper on stamps, they said, in the circular, and that was why in Moorang, in the main street, would read a paper on stamps, afterwards coffee, with a discussion, that this must be remembered or written down in a book with an imposition from Arthur Ball when the ink fell on the floor. But not Vic. Ink fell on a name, obliterated a face. Then he was going round and round, he felt he had been going round and round, his head or his feet, of which there was no trace on the carpet when looking, only where the coffee fell, but someone had been walking where there was no track. Or sign. No hat in the hall. All those faces at the school waited for a talk on stamps, and that was why you were there, the moustache and the twitching eye, or Miss Porter who would pour out coffee that did not fall, like ink, like not in school, because this was not the school, because Miss Porter said the advance of history commemorated by the philatelist by a cup of coffee or a stamp, take care Mr Moriarty, she said, a cup of coffee will pick you up if you fall, it’s tiring to read a paper, she said.
Ernest Moriarty felt the room sway. It did not hit him on the head. He parried the ceiling with his hand. It settled down like the pressure of misery, like a cat calling in the
dark, the deep swell of pent-up misery. I am here, he said, not Moorang, I have come why, because there is no longer a paper to be read, all this is over, like so much. You could feel it crumble as if a drink, and sitting in at Moorang having a drink, you would not stay, Miss Porter, you said, because Vic says I must go to the Crown, and that is the state of affairs, to have a drink, to feel a chair crumble and the shape of table in a glass of port, though not port said Vic, she said, you know, Ernest, how your chest, even at Christmas-time when Uncle Herbert sent what he would not have sent if they hadn’t given him commission on a bottle or two of port, but drink, Ernest, it’s only for your good that I say, the barman said it was fine old tawny, his wife was expecting, and sitting in at Moorang the face dissolved that expected nothing much.
The lamp had a milky china shade. It was an Aladdin lamp in the catalogue. He felt bad. He felt bad in at Moorang drinking fine old tawny port. His chest was a ravine of pain, the breath rare and hot that struggled up, he could not get up far enough, he could not drag a weight. And the voices, they went on, the voices in a bar, the random voices that said, that commercial in a check suit, the mechanic who had lost his mother the week before, said he was strung up and it bloody well served him right, because her head was beaten in, and it must have been a hammer, they thought, anyway she didn’t last long, not after the doctor came, and they caught him in the train near Scone, it was his second wife, she had a little money put by, she once had a pub in Singleton, anyway the bloke was strung up, took what was coming as cool as if, and it wasn’t as if there was
reason for what he done, but then if you read the papers you often wondered what entered people’s heads, there wasn’t reason for much. Cripes, said the barman, you’re looking off, he said. Then they turned, the random faces in bars. The looped wires of telephones said, the voice said, anonymously, I don’t want to intrude because Hagan is expecting your wife, so let’s go, Ernest, let go, let go of my hand, it’s only the port and you see it’s like this, my chest and to-morrow geography, must go. They put him on the floor and shot water on his face. I’ll be better, he said, I’ll be getting home, I’ll be getting back to Happy Valley, somehow this, even at night, before the water soak, I had no business drinking port, even at Christmas it doesn’t do. Collins was starting for Happy Valley, they said, out in the garage now, would a lift, would do, the barman said. He still felt queer, his chest. But he had to go home, had promised this. He left his pyjamas at the Crown.
All his life Ernest Moriarty had been going round and round, the small circles of habit, that yet was not as satisfactory as going round and round in a room, not so comfortingly blank. All your life you had been going round in circles for a purpose, at least you thought, you did not know it was non-existent. Now you had come to a stop, the purpose gone. He felt that coming home in Collins’s truck. The wind was black. He felt it was all over, only a few straws of habit clung, you could not shake them off, like coming home, like opening the gate, like wiping your boots on the mat. He put his key in the lock, heard it rattle, wondered what he was waiting for. The frost. He went round to turn off the water-tap. The time the wash-house
tap burst there was no end of a mess, and it’s washing day, said Vic, it’s a pity you’re not a plumber, Ernest, she said. It was a pity he wasn’t what he wasn’t. But there was no reason for him to be—well, anything, or what was the reason for anything when he hit her on the head. Or a hat in the hall, or a light. He went into the sitting-room. It all shelved away, and there was no reason for a lamp to walk round, round, breaking a match to find how frail, and so many more in the box, thirty or forty perhaps, as frail as a match.
He looked down at the fragments of a broken match. He looked at the lamp. He stood in the fragments of thought that the evening had strewn round, and momentary anaesthesia wrapped soothingly in black. Before it had returned, the room, that was also Vic, and not Vic, had slipped into the next room and there was…The breath rose in his chest. He could not breathe, move, heard the door, the footsteps, the rattle of his own breath. He could only stand in the sitting-room, where her hand trimmed a leaf, she said, there’s something saucy about this plant, they say you’ve got to keep it moist, though God, I’m tired of this suite, I’m tired, I’m tired, when I used to care for pink, but look at the spots, and the hole that Belper burnt, and why’ve we got to stay here all our lives, it makes me feel like suicide, only nobody would care. Vic’s life in a room was this, was pink, her hand touched, tied a bow. We’re making this, you said, it’s us, and I’m glad, Vic, you said, because… The cyclamen looked a waxen pink. The petals fluttered in his breath, that came fast, were without defence. His legs began to move.
He began to go into the other room. It was no longer
the bedroom, this, it was the other room. Two separate worlds. I’ve got to go in, he said. He could feel the sweat on his chest. It ran down cold. It was a long way, and the silence, and the sounds that break through silence made it longer still. But he opened the door, he stood, she watched him stand, there was only the silence between them, and the candlelight.
She could not speak. There was nothing to say now. She sat on the bed still, as if Hagan had only gone and fear had arrested a sheet in its passage to the floor. She thought, if Fred, if Daisy, if Clem going down the street perhaps for the last time, and the time that Tiny died she cried the dream she had with Ernest’s face the shawl. This made her hand stir, touch her skin, she was naked, sitting there, with Ernest in the doorway, and his face, and his face.
Ernest, she said, and it came out as if her tongue was sticking to the word, afraid to release it on a doubtful errand, let it go out towards a face that was not Ernest’s face.
Waiting for the moment that would break the tension, it must come soon, or something break, Vic Moriarty pressed back against the wall and Ernest Moriarty standing at the door watched each other crumble away, the face known, the personality, all eliminated except the basic flesh and bone and the passions that actuated these. And that is what made her afraid. Because this was not Ernest here, the face altered in line by the passing of a few hours. She began to make little convulsive gestures with her arms against the wall. The shadow followed laboriously.
What are you standing, why don’t you move? she said.
His face looked blue. Her voice stopped, thickening with fear.
All right, she rasped. All right then, we know, she rasped.
The shadows bent down. Perhaps it was the shadow on his face that she could not properly see, was not the expression that she thought.
Ernest, she said, Ernest, wailed against the wall, beat back her voice into her mouth, her fear. If only you’ll listen, she said, I’ll tell you. Ernest, it was like this.
He stood there. Her mouth froze.
Then she watched him coming forward. His arms were stiff. He was coming forward. She could look into his eyes. Oh God, then it was this that you did not like to think, or dream, as you lay on a bed and felt his breath coming hot, his hands.
No, not this, Ernest, she screamed. I didn’t. No. I’ll tell. But not this.
He got her up against the wall, felt her quiver, her body afraid that lay on the bed, they said the letter said, if only he had the breath to press, as looking into an eye it came up close, it swam, it flowed, and light delved down, he must press down with all his might, and they caught him in the train, and they strung him up, with the loops of telephone wire cutting right into the throat, snapped.
There was no sound in her throat, as if words had solidified, had stuck. Her hair hung floorwards. She drooped. This thing on the bed. He looked at it through the blur of his almost exhausted breath. Then it slipped down, the hair drifting and the sheet, it fell lumped upon the floor. He
looked at it. He wanted to crush out, the hands on neck, all semblance of a lie, even if his lungs tore and this was his last act. Because if she was not dead, he said, if she was not dead…His hands fumbled, stopped.
Ernest Moriarty looked down. He was kneeling on the floor beside. The sheet was red. He looked down at a face and the tongue swollen, clapper-wise, that he held in his hand protruding from the mouth of what had been a woman, like the face, was no longer this, this thing, no longer Vic. I have killed Vic, he said, she is gone. He pulled savagely, impotently, at the tongue of the thing that was no longer Vic.